[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  An artistic living room.  The principles of beauty and utility, restfulness, comfort, and suitability, must all be considered in the furnishing of a home]

Before furnishing is considered complete, the housekeeper must take into account the matter of operating apparatus.  Perhaps a large part of this important department of house equipment has been built into the house.  The water system, the sewer connection or its substitute, and the lighting apparatus are already installed, so that the turn of a switch or a faucet, the pull of a chain, sets one or all to work for us.  We are now to consider whether we shall buy a vacuum cleaner or a broom and dustpan; a washing machine and electric flatiron or the services of a washerwoman, or shall telephone the laundry to call for the wash.  Shall we invest in a “home steam-canning outfit” at ten dollars, or make up a list for the retailer of the products of the canning factory?  Shall we have a sewing machine, or plan to buy our clothing from “the store”?

Once upon a time practically the only labor-saving device possible to the housekeeping woman was another woman.  To-day many devices are offered to take her place.  Our homemaker must know about them, and must compare their value with the older piece of operating machinery, the domestic servant.  She must know what it costs to keep a servant, in money, in responsibility, and in all the various ways which cannot be reduced to figures.

Already the pros and cons of the “servant question” have caused much and long-continued agitation.  The woman of the future should be taught to approach the matter with a scientific summing up of the facts and with a readiness to lift domestic service to a standardized vocation or to abandon it altogether in favor of the “labor-saving devices” and the “public utilities.”  Certain of our home-efficiency experts assure us that all “industries in the home are doomed.”  If this is true, the domestic servant must of necessity cease to exist.  Most persons, however, cannot yet see how “public utilities” will be able to do all of our work.  We may send the washing out, but we cannot send out the beds to be made, the eggs to be boiled, or the pictures, chairs, and window sills to be dusted.  The table must be set at home, and the dishes washed there, until we approach the day of communal eating places, which, as we all know, will be difficult to utilize for infants and the aged, for invalids, and for the vast army of those who are averse to faring forth three times daily in search of food.  For a long time yet the domestic servant, or her substitute, will be with us, doing the work that even so great a power as “public utilities” cannot remove from the home.

[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  Contrast the bad taste displayed in the furnishing of this hopelessly inartistic room with the simplicity shown in that on page 43]